by Nick Joaquin
One October day Doña Ana came down from the altar to find Currito waiting for her. Keeping a respectful distance away, he requested and was given permission to speak. Whereupon he asked if the señora would give him her blessing? When she looked astonished, he smiled gaily and explained that he was going away. The troops were being sent to Ternate. They were leaving for Cavite immediately and from Cavite would take ship. Ternate was, as the señora knew, a perpetual battlefield. Many who went there never returned. But he was glad to go, said Currito, with a toss of his tawny curls. He did not regret to leave the city. No doubt the city would feel equally unregretful! Alas, he had no friend to wish him well on this journey. And his mother, that saintly woman, was on the other side of the world, in Malaga. Would the señora do him a Christian favor? Would she take his mother’s place and equip him with her blessing? It was not good that a man, however sinful, should leave on such a perilous expedition with no one to bless him, said Currito, smiling doggedly.
But Doña Ana, whom these words had moved to tears, approached and took him by the hand and led him to the altar. And pointing to the Sacrament and to the Virgin, she reminded him that no man was so sinful he could not, by a sincere contrition, make God his friend and the Virgin his mother. And what were human solicitudes compared with those of Heaven? But if he wanted her blessing, said Doña Ana, she would gladly give it to him and would pray for him while he was gone and he must not think himself friendless on earth for she was his friend. So, he knelt down and she blessed him—and as she looked at his bowed head the sudden knowledge filled her that this man would soon die. Long after he was gone she still knelt before the altar, praying the Virgin to recall her promise that no one devoted to her and her rosary would suffer a death so sudden as to make impossible a last act of sincere contrition.
She was startled awake the next day by the sound of thunder—and of wind-whipped rain clattering on the roof. The walls trembled and a window she ran to pull shut broke loose from her hands and went whirling away on the wind. By noon the typhoon had flooded the streets and unroofed half the city. As she dispensed dry clothes among the families who had sought refuge in her house, Doña Ana found herself trembling for Currito, and for all the poor soldiers caught by the storm at sea. She pictured them on their teetering decks, hurtled now upward, now downward; the rain beating on their faces and the wild sea piling in from all sides. Shuddering, she whispered prayer after prayer for them—for the poor Currito, especially, upon whom (as she feared) the rain was indeed beating hard at that moment, soaking him to the bone as he lay, wounded and bleeding, not on a ship’s deck but somewhere on the rocky coast of Mindoro. For the storm had caught the ship near that island; the ship had been hurled against the rocks and had shattered into pieces. A few men had saved themselves by swimming ashore, Currito among them and some other Spaniards, but the rest were natives who had been impressed to the service and who now turned against their cruel masters, pushing the Spaniards off the cliffs and hurling great rocks at them until they were all dead or dying, whereupon the natives fled to the wilderness.
So, the poor Currito lay on the flooded ground, unable to move; all his bones being broken and his whole body crushed to a pulp; the brute rain washing away the blood as fast as he shed it. And what with the cold, the pain, the exhaustion, and the loss of blood; he knew he must die in an instant. And straightway he fell to dwelling, not on the salvation of his soul, but on the things of earth his senses had enjoyed and would never enjoy again: thinking with anguish of food and drink and warm women, and of his home in Malaga, and of the fountains in Granada—and the intimate streets there: the families gathered on benches by the wayside, and girls’ eyes flashing from behind grilled windows as he rode past with the muleteers to the market, while up on the Sierra Morena were the cypresses and bandits among them and an old, old, bearded hermit brooding naked in a cave, and down in Ronda the weeds ate the mute circus of the Romans and he had come upon some shepherds gathered in silence to roast a lamb but he was fifteen and had no silences, no stillness within him and so went sailing down the Guadalquivir on a raft with two boys, past Cordoba with its conquered Arabic ramparts, past the vineyards and the convents, past the orange and olive groves and deep at last into the shining marvel of Seville, its minarets swarming in the sky and spilling doves and hours—the gypsies everywhere, sailors and merchants everywhere, silks and spices everywhere, taverns and palaces everywhere, with tapestries gorgeous upon their windows, for the king was riding forth in a glory of gold flags and brocades, the jeweled majas crowding on the balconies to drop roses and wave their fans, and himself munching figs and boiled chestnuts and feeling happy, very happy, until in Sanlucar the river ended, the glory ended, youth ended among the whores, and he had gone to Cadiz where the ships were, their tall wings whispering of the flawless worlds in the West but the fishing-fleet had taken him to Palma, where it smelled of clams, and to Tarragona, where it smelled of goats, and he had ended up in Toledo, among the lazarillos, playing thief and pimp and beggar amidst the busy gloom of the wintry imperial city, not having cared to go home to Malaga where now—alas!—he would never return again: nor to Palma, or Toledo, or Tarragona, or Seville: nor to the sweet wines of those places, whether cold in the cask or warm in the goatskin: nor to fish stewed in ripe lemons: nor to chicken boiled in thick olive oil: nor to buñuelos during the ferias: nor to puchero on Sundays; nor to the gypsy-girls and the majas and the snowlike blondes of the North since never again: never, never again would he sail homeward: never would feel under a ship’s hull the boisterous Atlantic stop, its turbulence dissolving into the stately, historic rhythms of the Middle Sea: while the homing ship, Africa and the Pillars behind it, turned smoothly north and north again, its great sails tranquil: the winds being heavier now, smelling of tilled earth and oranges and noisy with gulls’ wings: until there, in the thick mist, briefly appeared and vanished and appeared again, like enchantments of Arabian genii, vaguely glimmering at first, suddenly seen poised upon green hills and necklaced about with rivers: the white faery cities of the Andaluz.
And was it not a monstrous injustice (thought Currito) that, while the sun shone in those places and men ate and drank and were merry, he should be dying here in the mud, wracked by pain and cold, his bones broken and no part of his flesh unbruised? And he began to pity himself, lamenting himself as the most ill-used creature on earth, all the world against him now as from the moment of his birth. For surely he did not merit this punishment? Who was to blame for the evil he had wrought? Evil had been done him and he had merely repaid with evil. For an evil world had formed him; poverty had formed him; and greed; squalor; cruelty; hunger and suffering; the laws of the powerful; the insolence of the rich; the contempt of burghers; and the viciousness of the poor. Never, it seemed to him now, had he known a single moment of ease. The world had ground and ground him under its heels until here he lay in the mud, crushed and dying.
But the world should know that even a canalla had courage, had nobility, and knew how to die. He had always carelessly accepted whatever the Fates had given him: he would accept this death as carelessly. Sooner or later, anyway, one died. And the sooner, the better. But let the world witness how light-heartedly he performed this final business, thought Currito; such being human vanity that even at the hour of our death when, one might think, we would at last abandon the incoherent series of poses that we call the “self,” we are still more concerned over the judgment of the world than of Heaven, persisting, whether on a public scaffold or in a private bed, to play our life out like an actor impressing an audience. And though even the Son of God could not face death without horror and wonder, we presume to know better in what manner a man should die, ignorant indeed of the awful mysteries and liabilities of our sojourn on earth to be able to think it somehow noble to be careless of dying. So, our poor Currito, instead of attending to his soul, set to posing himself in his mind (being unable to move), seeing himself as a sort of stoic, reclining gracefu
lly in the mud, and defying the Fates (and the rain) with a smile.
He was sensible enough, however, to perceive in a moment the comedy of this pose and to find it so hugely amusing that, in spite of the pain and the flowing blood, he began laughing aloud at himself and had soon laughed away the bitterness inside him, laughter being the best purgative. And itemizing again his life’s circumstances, he saw them as quite blameless in themselves, the evil being himself, and his indolence: his refusal to take any but the easiest way out, or that which most afforded him a selfish profit. He tickled to think he had lamented himself as a lamb among wolves. So easy to blame the world, or one’s poverty, or your neighbor’s wealth! The root of evil was always in money, or the lack of it, in power, or class, or position, or the laws, or in the lack of them—but never in oneself. The world was always going to be remade by people who were too busy to remake themselves first and who left the world twice as miserable as before. But what were earthly miseries if one chose to be above them? Christ had preached an indifference not to wealth only, but to both wealth and poverty—a total indifference, in fact, to one’s status among men because you were intent on earning a status before God.
But he had loved to be talked about, thought Currito. He had loved to swagger and to be held in horror by the public and to be considered quite a devil. And it seemed to him that his wickedness had proceeded not from the heart but only from a childish taste for exhibition; that, essentially, he was a good man; and his evil, only a mask. God would surely forgive him. And, of course, the Virgin would intercede for him. He had been faithful to her in his fashion, saying her beads daily and saluting her at the angelic hours. She had always seemed near and clear to him; he had known her all his life. He had only to call on her and she would surely come and save him, thought Currito—whereupon he began praying her name aloud.
Straightway he was shaken to the bone by a terrific blast of lightning. The earth reeled and his senses blurred. Through stunned eyes he saw towering above him a woman robed in sunlight and crowned with the stars. But her face blazed with so fearful an anger she seemed the wrath of the storm made manifest. Seven swords plunged their cold steel in her heart but her left hand clutched a sword of fire. Silent she gazed at him, stern and beautiful—and he shook and sweated and shut his eyes against her, whimpering that he knew her not, that he had never known her, that it was not on her he had called. When he dared look again she was gone and the rain had ceased but the night was gathering fast all about him and the chilly winds whistled through the ruins of his bones.
And now did fear grip him in earnest: despair enhanced his torments. He was lost. He could almost hear the devils chuckling. So, had he known the Virgin all his life? But she had appeared before him and it seemed he did not know her after all and he realized how vast the mysteries were he had taken so lightly. He had felt too safe, too sure. Like so many Christians, he had depended too much on an old childhood familiarity with Heaven—and familiarity had bred presumption. He had dared to take Heaven for granted! And, meanwhile, he had followed his appetites wherever they had led him. And they had led him far indeed; they had lost him utterly. How could he presume to think his wickedness only a mask? It was his piety, rather, that was a mask, that was only a pose assumed to impress the Virgin and innocent old women like his mother and the Señora de Vera. He had dramatized himself as a weary wanton, a mystic Tenorio, torn between vice and piety, and weeping for heaven even while laughing among whores. His mother and Doña Ana, perhaps, he had deceived—but not the Mother of God. Alas, he had posed for the last time. Here at the ends of the earth, alone under the skies, he had been stripped naked to the bone and cracked open to the marrow, that the act of dying, at least, he might do honestly: knowing himself evil; knowing himself doomed to hell; and knowing the judgment just.
A great weariness possessed him. If he was damned, then damned he was! He felt no bitterness, only a desire to die quickly and perish in hell. And so exhausted was he in flesh and spirit he was sure he would die instantly if he but held his breath. But though he held it, though he relaxed his will, though he surrendered himself completely to dying—he could not die. Something seemed to stop him, to hold him back. He was not alone. The night was alive with presences. And with the clairvoyance of the dying, he knew what they were: people out in the world were praying for him. The night hummed with their voices, he could almost see their lips moving. Girls in school, old women by the wayside, priests at the altar, farmers in the field, and families gathered round the hearth—were praying, were praying for him, and for all sinners, now, and at the hour of their death. From the towns and cities of Spain, from Europe and from Africa, from the new worlds in the West and from the old worlds in the East—came the voices: choiring and clamoring and imploring God to forgive him his trespasses as they forgave those who trespassed against them.
And the poor Currito, though desiring intensely to die, found himself unable to do so, for the whole world seemed to have gathered around him, in choir upon choir of soft voices; determined to prevent him from dying. And now the serried choirs grew hushed and an old woman’s voice trembled clear in the night. Currito shivered. It was his mother’s voice: she was kneeling at the window of her shack by the wharves, looking out on the bay, and asking God to take care of her son. Then another voice rose tremulous—for Doña Ana de Vera was kneeling before the altar in her bedroom and begging the Virgin not to let him perish unshriven.
And how could he ever have thought himself alone, wondered Currito. Why had he ever supposed the world against him! It was he, rather, who had set himself against the world, against the human community of which he was part but had always rejoiced to play the outlaw and outside which he now desired to place himself eternally, by dying unrepentant, by dying in despair—the last gesture of utter egoism. And the world labored to save him now as it had labored to save him all his life. Monks were rising in the cold night to worship—because he had worshipped so little. They respected silence—because he had babbled so much. They enslaved their flesh—because he had been enslaved by his. Nuns went hungry (to atone for his greed) and were chaste (to atone for his lust) and humiliated themselves (to atone for his pride). For such is human solidarity that where any of us lack others may supply and the virtue of a single member nourishes the entire body.
And remembering how he had never done anyone good but rather had corrupted many by his infection, he marveled that the world should still care to save him, that its prayers should be clamorous about him, soaring in the night to the stars and to the very skies, knocking at Heaven itself on his behalf until he quaked to think how precious was a human soul and how shamefully he had wasted his own, and how full the world was of lovers, of God’s lovers. His heart ached with love for them; his heart ached and glowed so warmly with love, contrition flamed aflower in it and, crying out in a loud voice, he prayed God to have mercy on him and to forgive him his sins.
In that instant the voices vanished, and looking down the still shore where ragged palms leaned wearily on each other, their long boles black against the moonlit sky and the shattered glass of the sea, he saw coming toward him a woman with a child. His heart leapt. He knew her at once: he had known her all his life. How many times had he sought solace at her shrine in Manila! Up the shore she hurried, her simple robes trailing in the mud and radiating the moonlight. And now she had arrived at his side; now she was kneeling down in the mud; and now the two holy faces were bending over him, warm and fragrant and luminous. But what poignant sorrow was in those lovely faces! What a world of grief! And knowing himself the cause, he burned with shame, he ached with anguish. Every sin he had ever committed seemed to become a fresh wound in his body and each wound separately pained, agonized, suffered death-pangs, died, grew bloated, putrefied, and sprouted worms—until his whole body seemed rotted and matted with worms.
But with each separate pain, with each separate agony and death, the sorrow diminished in the hovering faces and he s
eemed to perceive new beauties in them, and not only perceived but understood, and not only those faces but the moon and stars above them, and the leaning palms also, and the sea and the prone earth, and why he was lying there—the two faces growing ever more beautiful and still more beautiful, as each throb of pain seemed to multiply his sight and his senses, and not only more beautiful but nearer, clearer, more profoundly, more completely understood, for as poems or great music grow in beauty as we grow in wisdom—mere cut blossoms only, when we are young and have not suffered deeply, whose petals wither and fall apart in our minds, their seeds dropping on the soil of our minds where, as we grow older, they take root and project a stalk and some branches and more and more leaves until, in our old age, knotted with grief and suffering, we find in ourselves the complete poem or music; not the blooms merely but the leaves, the branches, the stalk, and the knotted root also, and the knowledge of how it grew—so, in the space of one spellbound moment, as he passed from pain to greater pain, and from rapture to greater rapture, each pain intensifying the rapture and each rapture intensifying the pain, and always with so increased a radiance of the understanding that he seemed every moment to tremble at the verge of total wisdom, the two faces that hovered ever nearer as he beheld them ever clearer seemed at last to pass into his being, to become a part of himself, to be growing inside him, filling his mind with a beauty so absolute, so vibrant, it throbbed aloud, it thundered aloud into music, flooding his mind with music as, already, it had flooded the night outside and the whole universe with music—a fragrant music that roared with the sea and whispered with the palms and in which the earth and moon and stars were being whirled in wild rapture; his own blood rushing, his own breath gasping in time to it; his frail mind creaking and quaking as the mighty chords roared and rose and swelled louder and louder and still louder: a monstrous typhoon of fragrance made audible, of beauty made eloquent, surging and straining against the weak walls of mortality until—alas!—at the very moment when he seemed no longer able to contain it: at the very moment when it seemed indeed he must break and burst and release it—that tempest of beauty—and releasing it be released himself: be destroyed utterly and dissolved and thundered out as pure sound or pure fragrance and be whirled in space as the earth and moon and stars, singing, were whirled; at that uttermost moment: that utterly agonized, utterly enraptured moment of being almost but not yet one with the beauty that was a total music, and with the music that was a total wisdom, and with the wisdom that was God—a human voice shocked his rapt ears self-conscious, whereupon the music perished; earth and sky stopped and were silent; and the two faces that now loomed immense, seeming to fill the whole sky, became unbearably radiant; dazzled and blurred with radiance; and vanished, glorious, in a keen heavenly blaze of light that, with infinite dismay he saw swiftly fading into the mere dull glow of the sun; seeing also—though without astonishment, without full consciousness, as if drugged—that it was night no longer but broad daylight and that the ground around him was not muddy but hot and dry and the air above murmurous and that the mere dim light of the sun was pouring down from a noon sky upon a dim sea out there, where a vague ship leaned at anchor, and upon the dim shore down there, where vague figures had jumped off a boat and were stumbling among the rocks and palm trees, cupping (now definite) hands to their mouths to shout halloo there, halloo there.